Mr. Teng came to pick us up as arranged at 10:00. Jim and I had decided that we would have a better chance of accomplishing our goals if we sat down with him in the hotel before we left and went over the plan. Jim had some details of the sites on his phone and I brought my PC down to the lobby to give him an overview of our route. Jim had also used Google Maps to calculate the distance between sites. We also explained to him that we did not want to see any other sites and we did not want to stop anywhere on the way. None of the sites were more than 10 kilometers from where we were sitting at the time and all of them were simply stops on the side of the road. We set off with high hopes.

Our first target was a site near a village called Gia Le. It had been the site of our third location in Vietnam. We moved there on 6Jun66 from Danang. My personal goal for today was to replicate the view from the site showing a panoramic view looking out towards the sea.

Gia Le site looking east

When we moved there the site was barren except for a lot of graves, some very simple and some very elaborate, scattered all around. The Google Earth image shows some sort of a campus on the site. The campus includes what appears to be an olympic-sized swimming pool and a pond that is formed by a dam.

When we got there we found that the site is wooded and is now occupied by a Vietnamese Army barracks. Teng didn’t want to stop but I got him to stop and I got out to take a picture. For those who were there, this gate is located just about where the Vietnamese barbershop was located near the entrance to our compound. Teng was very nervous about me running around a military site with a camera but he came along with me and chatted up the guard who came out to meet me and tell me that photos were not allowed. We eventually got back into the car and headed off to the next site.

Front Gate

We continued on our journey. The next site was the location of our fourth location in Vietnam on the southern perimeter of the Phu Bai enclave. I had visited this location on my 2011 trip but I learned soon after I returned that my plot of the site was off by about a half a kilometer due to discrepencies in the map coordinate systems. We headed off to the site with confidence since the new plot put the site directly on the side of the road. When we got to a big intersection Jim informed Teng that we wanted him to drive exactly 6.6 KM and then stop. Teng was still totally clueless as to what we were doing but he drove off. As I sensed that we were getting close I powered up the GPS in my bag and watched us draw closer and closer to the target. Teng would have driven past the site (despite all we had said to him, he still thought we wanted to go to the airport) but we told him to stop. It was kind of funny because he stopped the car and Jim and I both jumped out of the car. I began walking down the side of the road watching my GPS display and Jim took off looking for anything that looked similar to the picture of a grave that Larry Hilton sent me a few weeks ago that he said was out in front of our position. I am now confident that we located the position and I took some pictures to document it. The pictres below are taken from less than 50 feet apart but more than 50 years apart.

View in 1967

View in 2017

After I finished taking the picture I walked back to the car and found Teng sitting in a shed with a local guy drinking tea. He offered me a cold bottle of water as I arrived. The proprietor seemed to be curious about what we were doing so I cranked up my Kindle and began showing him pictures of the site taken in 1966 and 1967. He immediately understood what he was looking at and began to talk with Teng. He pointed out the river on one of the pictures and explained to us that you couldn’t see it now because of the trees. He also told us that this was an “Army Base” during the American War and it dawned on him that Jim and I had been there during the war. I am not certain, but I think his conversation finally made Teng understand what we were doing. Up until then he had been clueless. I showed him the picture of the grave that Larry had sent me

Grave at Phu Bai site

and he identified it as a “Nguyen Family grave” and said there was one similar to it about a kilometer down the road but we didn’t pursue it. Next we were off to a position where we had located two guns during the summer of 1967. I asked Teng to drive us to the Minh Mang tomb. We had no intention of going to the actual tombs but the site we wanted to visit was a few kilometers beyond the tombs on the same road. We got to the tombs and Jim gave Teng the exact distance to the site in kilometers. We hadn’t gone far before we realized that Teng had no idea what Jim was talking about. He didn’t understand what an odometer was and, in fact, he had the display on his car set so the odometer was hidden. It wasn’t a big deal because I knew the site was located just off the road and I had it programmed into my GPS. When we got there we found, you guessed it, a military facility. Also, as in the other cases, it was very wooded so it was impossible to see the horizon.

Operation Cumberland Jul67

Operation Cumberland site 2017

All I can figure is that we had a knack for picking spots that were prime real estate because Jim and I found several of our positions had been converted into Vietnamese military facilities. All in all it was a good day. We located all three spots I was loking for. We got verbal agreement that the place we found had been a US military site. We headed back to Hue and had Teng drop us off at a restaurant close to our hotel that was recommended to us. The food was great and the beer was cold.

I was not anticipating any problems on the drive from Danang to Hue. It is a simple case of driving from one hotel in one city to another hotel in another city and for the most part if turned out fine. Our driver, Mr. Teng, drove down from Hue and picked us up on time. He was familiar with the destination and that was reassuring. He appeared to have a basic understanding of English but it didn’t take long to realize that his command of English was worse than my command of German, which is negligible. I took a few tries to get him to understand that we wanted to go over the Hai Van pass rather than taking the tunnel under the pass. The trip over the pass was very pretty. The last time we were on that road was around the first of June, 1966. I can’t tell you if anything changed because I don’t remember anything about the drive except that I was Bert’s driver and we had a trailer attached to the Jeep and Bert allowed me to put my footlocker in the trailer with his stuff.

Jim and Bob on the Hai Van Pass

Hai Van Pass summit looking North

The plan was to then stop at a restaurant on Lang Co beach. I had been there in 2011 and it was rated highly. I must have told the driver 3 times I wanted to stop at the Lang Co Beach Resort. When we got to the peninsula the driver asked, “You want fish and crabs at Lang Co?” to which I restated that we wanted to go to the Lang Co Beach Resort. As I was saying that we pulled into a shanty restaurant on the wrong side of the peninsula. He turned off the engine and announced, “You get fish and crabs here.” I told him I wanted to go to the Lang Co Beach Resort. At his point it was turning into a battle of wills and, since we were paying I thought we should win.”  He started the car, drove a few hundred meters across the peninsula and pulled into the parking lot of the Lang Co Beach Resort. The parking lot was empty. He said the place was open but we went in only to find it was, in fact, closed. We drove back to the shack. Our driver sat and ate with the locals (probably his cousins) and we ate lunch.

Eating Pho at Lang Co

We got to Hue with no incidents. Highway 1 has been greatly improved with the addition of two new tunnels between Lang Co and Phu Bai and it made the trip much shorter and easier. I watched Jim go through the same reactions that I had when I saw Phu Bai in 2011. It’s hard to imagine how built up it is now when you think of how rural it was when we were there before. It is so different from what we recalled that it is actually disorienting. For those who were there in the 1960’s you may recall that highway 1 from Phu Bai to Hue was a narrow two-lane road that had a sprinkling of huts and small houses on the east side of the road. You could look off to the east (the right) and you could see miles of rice paddies. Today it is a four-lane road with a median and it is so densely populated that you cannot see anything on the side of the road besides houses.

Tomorrow we head off to visit the sites around Hue. These include the 3rd and 4th Battery center locations and the sites of a few of our deployments in 1966 and 1967.

I have spent a lot of time in Asia. I feel I have a lot of Asian friends but the Vietnamese are an enigma to me. I am certain it is more than a language issue. It seems like an issue with Vietnamese attitudes and approach. We decided to use the same driver today as we used yesterday. I figured I could work around some of the issues we had the day before with a little prior planning. Either there are no real maps available here or our driver, Kevin, either didn’t know where to get one or he really didn’t want to use one. So, I documented where we wanted to go and I emailed the information in the form of Google Map screenshots and pictures to him at the email address he had given me.

When we got on the road he assumed we could start in Hoi An (an ancient city and tourist attraction) and go on from there but he actually had no idea where we wanted to go because he never got the emails I sent and never asked me. He told us later his son had changed his email address and never told him. Anyway he suddenly pulled off the road on the way to Hoi An and stopped at a showroom for a jade shop. The stuff was beautiful but we had never told him that we were interested in Jade or that we wanted to shop.

I finally got him to stop and, using my Kindle and some of the maps I had stored on it, explained to him where we needed to go. When the full scope of what I wanted to do was obvious to him his whole attitude changed. He complained that this is much more than he had assumed and immediately wanted to negotiate a new price for his service. I reminded him that I had told him I wanted to visit three sites south of the city so it should not have been a surprise. All in all I found that dealing with Kevin was like pushing a rope.

I also learned that Jim and I both have a pretty good sense of direction and we both know how to read maps. Also, I have a GPS with the locations we want to visit programmed on it so it is very obvious to me when we were headed in the wrong direction, which we were several times yesterday. With all the paraphernalia we had with us he actually stopped a few times yesterday to ask a local farmer for directions. In at least two cases he got the wrong directions and he followed them despite our objections. I can’t tell you some of the paths (as opposed to roads) we took following the directions he got.

Anyay, I have to stop using this blog to rant. I’m sure no one wants to hear it and it doesn’t do me any good to go on about it.

Our plan for the day was to visit three 1st Guns sites. They were the An Hoa combat base, Hill 65, and Hill 55. Neither Jim or I had ever been to these places but they were places the battery had occupied after we left Vietnam.

Targets for Day 2

We eventually found the An Hoa site. There is a factory on the site so we didn’t actually stand on the Battery Center but we got within 100 feet. We did however get to stand on the remains of the runway that was there. It was in surprisingly good shape after 50 years and I don’t think it was used after the US left Vietnam.

An Hoa compound entrance

An Hoa runway panorama

Our next target was Hill 65. We actually found this site with a little pointing, prodding, and grunting. Of course everything is populated now but it wasn’t hard to find a 190 foot hill with a large monument on it.

Hill 65 in 1969

We actaully found a flight of stairs that went from the road up to the monument. For those of you who were there, this monument is on the southern end of the hill and the camera is looking towards the northeast.

Monument atop Hill 55

Stairs leading down to the road

By this time we had been on bad roads for 3 hours. The idea of coaxing Kevin anywhere near Hill 55 was just too daunting so we abandoned the quest. We went back to Danang. Jim found the Chicken with Lemon Grass he wanted. I got a great dish of VN fried rice and some Tiger beers. The rice and a couple of beers cost me $6.35.

Tomorrow we have decided to go to Hue by car. We’re using the same car company but since we are going directly from our hotel in Danang to our hotel in Hue with one stop on the way at a great seafood restaurant on the way at Lang Co I am not anticipating any problems.

Talk to you tomorrow.

In December of 1965 I had just got back to the states from Cuba. It was good to be back in Camp Lejeune after 6 months of the heat, humidity, iguana’s, and enormous rats in Guantanamo Bay but something had changed in Camp Lejeune since we had left six months earlier. I soon learned that the difference was that a lot of people were getting orders to WestPAC and that almost invariably meant that they were headed for Vietnam. Like most of the guys, I had never heard of Vietnam until we were in Cuba. Marines had recently landed in Danang and we were hearing stories about combat breaking out. Little did we know that within two years there would be almost a half a million men there and that most of us would be included in that number.

Once I got the orders to go, the first thing I had to do was to report to sick bay to get some shots. I remember getting something called gamma globulin – a lot of it. I still to this day don’t know what gamma globulin was for but the Marine Corps seemed to be in love with it. The standard dose was one cc per ten pounds of body weight. Since I weighed about 200 pounds in those days I got 20cc’s, 10ccs in each cheek. 10cc’s is a big shot and I remember having trouble sitting for a while after getting the shots. At least they gave me an equal amount in each cheek so I wasn’t lopsided.

I went back to Boston on leave, spent some time with Janet and my family, and in mid-January of 1966 I headed for Camp Pendleton in California. Guess what was the first thing I got when I reported for duty in Camp Pendleton? You guessed it – 20cc’s of gamma globulin. I spent 6 weeks in California training for Vietnam. The training consisted of listening to newly-returned guys telling us how we would be killed when we landed in country. Notice I said “would” be killed rather than “might” be killed. Everyone I know that went to Vietnam as part of a replacement company like I did and was trained in Camp Pendleton landed in Vietnam convinced that they had been handed a death sentence and would be dead within hours of landing “in country”. The training also consisted of spending hours marching up and down the hilly terrain of the California coast in February, when it gets pretty chilly, preparing to go to a tropical country where I spent most of my time less than 20 meters above sea level.

Sometime during my “training” someone decided that I wasn’t old enough to go to Vietnam and get killed (I hadn’t turned 19 when I got to California) and they assigned me to another replacement company that was scheduled to ship out a few weeks later than the company I had trained with. Guess what was the first thing on the agenda for this new company? You guessed it – gamma globulin. So I got another 20cc’s. I won’t drag this story out any longer but I’ll simply tell you that when we got to Okinawa we all got another dose of gamma globulin.

When I got to Vietnam I was assigned to an artillery unit, which I expected because I was an Artilleryman. This unit had just landed in Vietnam a few days before. Actually they had spent the time I was running up and down the hills in California sitting on a ship heading for Vietnam. I ended up spending 19 months and 22 days with that outfit, 1st 155mm Guns, and I spent all of that time with four other guys.

Tomorrow I will leave Honolulu with one of those four guys. His name is James Kiser but for some reason we all called him Clyde. I learned a few years ago that Clyde is actually his middle name. So here we go, over 51 years after we first met, and together we will retrace our steps from Danang to Phu Bai and points north. I am going to try to post an entry in this blog every day we are in country. Welcome aboard.

On May 3rd James Kiser and I, Bob Simington, will be returning to Vietnam. We plan to visit Danang, Hue, and Dong Ha and we intend to locate and photograph a lot of the positions 1st Guns occupied during its deployment to Vietnam. I also intend to maintain a blog of our trip on this site. Hopefully, the blog will be as well-received as the one I maintained on my last visit in 2011 (here).

Stay tuned.